It’s what informs my analysis of images, imagination, and the digital in The New Lives of Images. Here is the three-minute version of it.
The universe is a living, dynamic, and responsive universe. It is made not of static objects, but of events — events which elicit other events. Its most basic unit is an event of “response” to “things given.”
Events elicit other events: they evoke or draw out responses. At its simplest, this elicitation is directly causal, as with a billiard ball in motion hitting another billiard ball and setting it into predictable motion. But as this relationality gets complex — and the universe we know is quite complex — the elicitation, and the responsiveness to it, take on higher-order forms. Things — which make up the events we perceive and experience — come to “stand for” other things, which they do in three basic ways: through their directly causal force (the billiard ball model), through their resemblance to the “other things” they come to stand for (the recognition model), and through their being interpretable within a system of meaning-making (the interpretation model).
These are the three basic forms of “sign,” or responsive sense-making. C. S. Peirce called them indexes, icons, and symbols: indexes are signs that mean and act through a directly causal relationship; icons are signs that mean and act through their resemblance to what they refer to; and symbols are signs that mean and act as part of an evolved system of meaning-making, such as language. To say that they “mean and act” is meant to suggest that meaning and action, or meaning and effect, work together. They are neither purely “mental” nor purely “physical,” but both: from their “outside” they are physical, from their “inside” they are mental. Cartesian dualism, which separates the mental from the physical, is in this sense a misleading abstraction.
Most living creatures tend to act by “responding to things given” either directly (i.e., indexically, through the causal force of the world within which they find themselves), or through recognizing things they sense or perceive from their previous experience (iconically), or both. But some of us develop complex systems of symbols that help us make sense of the neuro-sensory data that we encounter in our lives. (It’s “neuro-sensory” because the senses are always configured by the neural architecture of the embodied creature.) Humans are not the only organisms who make symbolic sense of the world, but our languages make us especially complicated in this respect. We make sense of the world and respond to it through complex systems of indexes, icons (or images), and symbols (such as words).
We develop methods of interpretation and responsiveness, which we today call “art,” “religion,” “science,” and so on. “Religion” works through a kind of social conformation by which specific icons, indexes, and symbols — images, gestures, rituals, narratives, and the embodied experiences they elicit — come to organize our behavior within the environments in which we live. “Science,” by contrast, specializes in the tracing of indexical relations — direct causal relations between things — which results in more reliable sense-making, even if it’s less immediately useful for most everyday purposes. Both are complex phenomena, with many overlaps, but this basic difference accounts for a certain tension that runs between them.
Everything I’ve just described has been elucidated by processual and semiotic philosophers including Peirce (the founder of modern semiotics), A. N. Whitehead (the exemplary modern philosopher of process), and many others over the centuries, from Heraclitus, the Stoics, and a great many Buddhists — who specialize at analyzing how the things of our experience arise and pass away, i.e., semiotic process — to modern and contemporary philosophers like Bergson, Simondon, Deleuze, Stengers, Deely, Latour, and Massumi. There are of course huge differences in the details, and what I’m articulating here is my own distillation, with grounding in the fields of visual and media studies, science studies, the study of cognition, and plenty more.
In The New Lives of Images, I focus on the iconic mode of sense-making — that is, on images, which are events of meaning-making that function through resemblance to things seen, heard, or perceived elsewhere or elsewhen. Images, I argue, are immensely important for us to understand because (1) they are more primary in our experience than language (the symbolic register), and therefore more formative of our imaginaries, our embodied, affective, and cognitive responses to things; (2) in our complex, globalizing world, images and their meanings all too readily become the focus of sharp conflicts; and (3) our image-making capacities (our “imaginations”) are becoming dramatically, and somewhat unpredictably, reshaped and reconfigured by digital media.
In order to imagine, and to create, a better world than the confusing, conflicted, and “feverish” one we face today, we need to understand imagination, and to make use of it, better than we do. The New Lives of Images is my in-depth effort to get at that task. It builds on Ecologies of the Moving Image, which focused on cinematic meaning-making, but also on my earlier work on “place-practices” (as in Claiming Sacred Ground) and my more recent writing about living in — and out of — the “shadow” of the Anthropocene (Shadowing the Anthropocene).